Articles - CHAD BIRDhttp://www.chadbird.com/blog/Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:21:23 +0000en-USSite-Server v6.0.0-17299-17299 (http://www.squarespace.com)Chad Bird brings the Good News of Christ to broken people who crave honest, <br/>raw Christianity. He is a writer, speaker, and teacher who unearths the <br/>riches of Christ in the Old Testament.So You Don't Like Your PastorChad BirdThu, 14 Mar 2019 11:28:51 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2019/3/14/so-you-dont-like-your-pastor560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c8a3933971a1875842dd589Pastors are built from the same stuff as everyone else. That’s good, and
that’s bad.Buried somewhere in the piles of boxes in my garage is the composite picture of the graduating class of Concordia Theological Seminary in 1996. There’s a whole lot of black and white in that color picture, what with all the clerical shirts and clerical collars and clerical teeth smiling for the camera.

I learned theology with them, debated with them, partied with them, prayed with them. And through it all, one truth arose to the surface, over and over again. It’s an obvious truth, but sometimes it’s the obvious truths that we tend to ignore the most. And it’s a truth that the congregations they serve frequently forget: these pastors, although they stand in the stead of Christ to minister to the people of God, are fissured through and through with the same fears and flaws, loneliness and lust, desires and desperations, as the folks in the pew.

Pastors are built from the same stuff as everyone else. That’s good, and that’s bad.

It’s good because the more they’re able to identify with the people to whom they minister, the better ministers they’ll probably be. The more they’re acquainted with grief, the better comforters they’ll be at the graveside. The more they know of depression, the better they’ll be at walking with the downcast through their dark valleys. They can sympathize with the weakness of the human heart, and apply to other hearts the same divine, healing words that they apply to their own. It’s a good thing that pastors are built from the same stuff as everyone else.

And it’s a bad thing.

It’s a bad thing for lots of reasons. It means that some of them, when they struggle with the same lust that bedevil us all, will succumb, will fall, and will likely find themselves divorced both from marriage and ministry.

It means that a few of them will become so lonely, so depressed, that when the pills and booze no longer do the trick, they opt for the loaded pistol next.

It means that sometimes they will quarrel with members over stupid things, that they’ll sulk because of wounded pride, that they’ll show favoritism.

Because they’re built from the same stuff as everyone else means that pastors are sinners, and, as such, they’re going to suck at their job sometimes. Maybe lots of times.

It also means that we’re not always going to like our pastors. They’re not always going to be the charming, polite, patient, thick-skinned, wise, caring soul that we expect them to be.

Did they not seem all there last Sunday? A bit red-eyed, possibly even hung over? Perhaps there was a marriage spat late Saturday night about something that’s none of our damn business, they imbibed too much alcohol afterward, and got two hours sleep on the couch. It happens. And I bet some version of that happens at your house, too. Cut them some slack. They’re built of the same stuff as we are.

Did they not seem overjoyed to take your call last Friday? Did it cross your mind that it might have been the one day off they have, or that they’ve worked 70+ hours this week, or that they have a migraine, or simply that they’re worn down from caring for hurting people and desperately need a vacation (not to mention a sabbatical!) that they probably can’t afford? Cut them some slack. They’re built of the same stuff as we are.

Christians live and breathe by the forgiveness of sins. And pastors do too. They turn to the same crucified and resurrected Lord as we do. They confess. They hear the absolution. They believe. They commune at the same altar of his body and blood.

For they fail—they fail themselves, they fail their spouses and children, they fail their congregation. @@Pastors are flesh-and-blood sinners riddled through with weaknesses, most of which they keep hidden deep within.@@ Don’t expect them to be perfect. And don’t expect to like them all time.

But do this: forgive them. It’s one of the greatest gifts we can give our pastors: to cover their multitude of sins with our love, to extend to them the same forgiveness they extend to us, to welcome them as fellow sinners who live by the same Lord of grace as we do.

The word “pastor” simply means “shepherd.” There are not-so-great shepherds, okay shepherds, and plenty of good ones out there. The two pastors I have—I wouldn’t trade them for anyone else.

But here’s the thing: there’s only one wholly good shepherd. We call him Jesus. And he’s the only truly perfect pastor that will ever serve the church.

]]>So You Don't Like Your PastorRiding Tandem Toward a Flourishing LifeChristianity and CultureChad BirdSat, 16 Feb 2019 14:09:34 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2019/2/16/riding-tandem-toward-a-flourishing-life560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c681420f4e1fcbaed77d94bThis black-and-white photograph, taken in the l890’s, perfectly captures in
a single image what it means to flourish as a human being in an imperfect
world. We may not be challenged by any physical disability, but all of us
are lacking in one way or another. And our impairments are the very reason
God pairs us with others. In those pairings, in those dependent
relationships, we learn that we not only need others, but are in fact
created to need others.Two men meet and become friends. They get along so well that they end up working together. Each man has his talents, each his difficulties, but together they make a great team. This, of course, is not an unusual story. In fact, it’s so common that it hardly seems worth telling.

But sometimes the story is so unique—and so instructive—that it merits our attention. Indeed, sometimes the story encapsulates what it means to be a human being. The friendship and working relationship of Eli Bowen and Charles Tripp is just such a story.

Arms and Legs

Eli Bowen was born in northern Ohio in 1844. From the waist up, he looked like an average guy, probably one who could hold his own at the gym. A deep chest. Nicely biceped arms. The kind of guy you’d want at your side in a fistfight. But from the waist down, he was anything but average. He was born with a rare defect known as phocomelia, in which his undeveloped feet were attached to his hips. He had no legs.

Eleven years after Eli was born, another boy came into the world. Charles Tripp was born in Ontario in 1855. Unlike Eli, from the waist down, Charles looked like a normal guy. Two legs, two feet. But he was different physically from the average person in one way: he was born with no arms. From an early age, he learned to use his feet for virtually everything most of us use our hands to do: everything from combing his hair to writing to shaving.

Both Eli and Charles supported themselves and their family by performing in the circus. Later, they met and became friends and coworkers. Their unique partnership was captured in an unforgettable photo. There sits Charles on the back of a tandem bicycle, his feet on the pedals, ready to get them moving. And there sits Eli on the front of the bicycle, his hands on the handlebars, ready to steer.

To me, what’s especially memorable about this performance is that it’s so ordinary. They’re not on the trapeze. They’re on a bicycle. Going for a ride. Looking like they’re just having a good time, doing what friends might do, acting as if it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.

@@Two men, each strong and capable and talented in one area, and also lacking in another area, were able to do together what neither was able to do alone.@@

Created to Need Others

This black-and-white photograph, taken in the l890’s, perfectly captures in a single image what it means to flourish as a human being in an imperfect world. We may not be challenged by any physical disability, but all of us are lacking in one way or another. And our impairments are the very reason God pairs us with others. In those pairings, in those dependent relationships, we learn that we not only need others, but are in fact created to need others.

The very first “not good” of this world was a man alone. It was not good for Adam to be an isolated individual. He needed someone to help him, to be by his side, for without that other person he couldn’t be the man that God had created him to be. Alone, Adam couldn’t guard and keep the garden. He couldn’t have children. He couldn’t subdue the earth. He was impaired by his very isolation. He may have seemed like the perfect individual, but he wasn’t. To truly flourish in the world, he needed another person alongside him.

Our American ethos trumpets the ideal of the rugged individual who doesn’t need anyone else. But that’s not only a lie; it’s also the recipe for disaster. In our working lives, our social lives, our religious and political lives, we will never be the people God wants us to be if we pretend that we can be and do everything on our own. We need friends, coworkers, families, and churches—and they need us. We flourish not in isolation but unity.

On that bicycle, Eli was the arms of Charles as Charles was the legs of Eli. The image reminds me of the picture that Paul gives us of the body of Christ. Some of us are the eyes, some the feet, some the hands, others the ears. The ear cannot say to the eye, “I don’t need you.” Nor can the hands say to the feet, “We don’t need you.” All the parts of the body work best when all the parts of the body know and acknowledge their dependence on all the other parts of the body.

The older I get, the more I’m thankful for my impairments, my shortcomings, my deficiencies, all the areas of my life where I can’t make it on my own. I’m thankful for these because, what I lack, God supplies in other people. And those other people are truly God’s gifts to me. Together, we can ride that tandem bicycle, we can be the church, we can be friends and coworkers who complete each other.

The Father has so arranged the world, and redeemed it in Christ, to make each of us deficient in and of ourselves, and sufficient in and of others. Thank God for what we lack, for in what is lacking, we will learn not only humility, but love for the person through whom the Lord supplies our need.

]]>Riding Tandem Toward a Flourishing LifeForgiving Others Is Not All About You: When Forgiveness Mutates into Self-HelpTheological ReflectionsChad BirdMon, 28 Jan 2019 21:14:39 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2019/1/28/forgiving-others-is-not-all-about-you-when-forgiveness-mutates-into-self-help560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c4f6ce0352f533062729490We don’t need a psychologist to inform us that people who are charitable,
caring, and compassionate generally rank higher on the happiness scale. We
know people like this. And we’ve experienced it ourselves. We go out of our
way to lend someone a hand or donate a little extra to charity, and what
happens? We feel a rush of pleasure. We feel better about ourselves.We don’t need a psychologist to inform us that people who are charitable, caring, and compassionate generally rank higher on the happiness scale. We know people like this. And we’ve experienced it ourselves. We go out of our way to lend someone a hand or donate a little extra to charity, and what happens? We feel a rush of pleasure. We feel better about ourselves.

Helping others usually results in helping ourselves. This is part of Being Human 101.

But let’s imagine if this fact becomes the primary platform from which we urge people to do good deeds.

“Give money to charities so that you’ll feel better about yourself.”

“Shovel snow from the driveway of your elderly neighbor so that you can experience the sensation of being a great person.”

“Send flowers and a get-well card to your friend in the hospital so that you’ll be happy and realize what a caring person you are.”

If that strikes you not only as silly but self-serving, then you’re right. It is. If we go around doing good deeds with the goal of building ourselves up, feeling better about who we are, then our ostensible neighborliness is little more than camouflaged narcissism.

What’s surprising, therefore, is how this same basic mentality—as silly and self-serving as it is—has become crazy popular when speaking about forgiving others. Ask Google why we should forgive others and the thousands of answers boil down to this: for ourselves. For our benefit. For our well-being.

It’s usually expressed this way: Forgiving others is a gift we give ourselves.

But it’s not. @@Forgiving others isn’t a gift we give ourselves, but the gift that God in Christ gives to others through us.@@

What does it mean to forgive? For the Christian, it means simply this: to see all sins and all sinners in the crucified body of Jesus. And I do mean “all.” From the Nazi guard to the pedophile priest. From the petty criminal to the gossiping octogenarian. From the racist to the road-rager. All. None excepted. Jesus on the cross was all humanity compressed into one person. The one righteous man became all unrighteous people to atone for us all.

Just as we believe ourselves to be forgiven because God sees us in Christ, so to forgive others is to see them as God sees them in Christ. To forgive, in other words, is to put God’s eyes in our eyes and our eyes in God’s eyes. And those divine eyes see humanity only through the cross of Jesus.

For this reason, Paul tells us, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, to clothe ourselves with “compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col. 3:12-13).

Note that last phrase: As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. It echoes the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Notice the order: God’s forgiveness of us leads directly to our forgiveness of others.

But here is where something crucial emerges: the forgiveness we give is not truly ours. Forgiveness is not our personal possession. We don’t own it or control it or (worst of all) manipulate it. Forgiveness has one name written on it: Jesus Christ. He is the sole proprietor of this treasure because he is the sole cause of its existence. All true forgiveness flows from him for he is the one nailed to the cross of atonement. Absolution is the gold he mined on Calvary.

When we forgive, we do so as the Lord has forgiven us. The better we know ourselves, the deeper our awareness of the selfish, horrible, shameful thoughts and desires and words and deeds of which we are guilty, the more we know of what the Lord has forgiven us.

@@When we look over the vast sea of our own sin, it’s much harder for us to fixate on the puddle of pain, or even the lake of misery, someone has caused us.@@ Yet both—our wrongs and others’ wrongs against us—have all been poured into the mouth of God’s Son. He drank the vast sea of our evil just as he did the puddle or lake of our enemy. And not a single drop is left.

When we forgive, therefore, we forgive as those who have been forgiven. And it is not truly we who forgive but God in Christ who forgives others through us. We say, “Just as I have been made alive in Christ, so Christ through me passes on that life to you. Just as I have found new hope in my Savior, so he gives you new hope through my lips.” Far from doing this as a self-gift, the Father, in the Spirit, bestows this gift of Jesus on others who likewise need to hear such life-changing news.

Does forgiving others make us feel good? It might. If it does, thanks be to God! That’s a great comfort and source of joy.

But it also might hurt like hell. It might hurt like death to forgive. That’s no surprise, for forgiveness means something has to die. Our resentment. Our grief. Our revenge. Our desire for a pound of flesh. Our plans to keep throwing sins into the face of others. They all die in Jesus, as do we, that we might emerge into newness of life as those who know we are forgiven, and likewise forgive others.

Forgiving others isn’t all about us. @@Just as God in Christ did not absolve us for his own benefit but ours, so he passes on that same absolution to others through us for their benefit.@@

O Lord Jesus, our great Absolution, may it ever be so among us, your beloved and forgiven children.

++++++

*I’d like to thank my friend and brother in Christ, Tim Rake, for his Facebook note, “The Feeling of Forgiveness,” that gave me the idea for this post.

]]>Forgiving Others Is Not All About You: When Forgiveness Mutates into Self-HelpA Lament for the Killing of the UnbornChristianity and CultureChad BirdFri, 25 Jan 2019 00:23:57 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2019/1/24/a-lament-for-the-killing-of-the-unborn560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c4a533a4d7a9ca32820819cWhile wombs become killing fields,
and a holocaust smokes out of our nation’s heart,
where are You, O God of life?While wombs become killing fields,and a holocaust smokes out of our nation’s heart,where are You, O God of life?

While lawmakers’ handsclap over the corpses of Your children,why are You silent?

While those You fearfully and wonderfully madeare callously and cruelly slaughtered,why are You sleeping, O Lord?

Does the Creator of the eye not see?Does He who formed the ear not hear?Will He who fashioned our hands not act?

How long, O Lord,will the voice of children’s bloodcry out to You from the ground?

How long will hope be aborted,choice made an idol,and evil reign?

Do not delay, O Lord, for trouble is near,for the land has conceived wickedness,it is pregnant with violence,and it gives birth to a brood of vipers,whose god is their shame.

Awake, O Lord!Arise, and do not keep silent.Lift up Your handto break the hearts of the evildoers,to humiliate those who hate you,and to shield the tiny icons of your love.

O Lord Jesus, have mercyfor we have no light in the darkness save You.Open our blinded eyes.Soften our adamantine souls.And bring forth the dawn of life.Amen and Amen.

]]>A Lament for the Killing of the UnbornIs it OK for a Former Adult Film Producer to Serve Holy Communion?Chad BirdThu, 17 Jan 2019 14:11:00 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2019/1/17/is-it-ok-for-a-former-adult-film-producer-to-serve-holy-communion560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c40854088251be368bfd070There are some elements of disgust that are more universal. One of these is
that, once something has been deemed unclean, polluted, toxic, or
contaminated, it not only remains that way, but it also passes on its
disgusting quality to whatever it touches.When I see a father walk into a public restroom with his young son, I already know what I’m about to overhear: “Don’t touch anything… no, stop, keep your hands away…. come here and wash… get plenty of soap on your hands.” I’ve heard it hundreds of times. Children (especially boys!) aren’t born with a knowledge of germs. They must learn the meaning of “dirty,” “nasty,” “gross,” or “filthy.” Adults pass on to children the categories of clean or unclean, acceptable or disgusting. It’s Parenting 101.

But the learning of disgust extends far beyond good hygiene. We learn, for example, which foods are disgusting. If I invite some Americans over for dinner and tell them I’m serving barbecued dog, they’ll be outraged and disgusted. Yet, in some parts of the world, my guests would show up with an appetite. We learn early on which foods are considered acceptable, and which are not: Cow? Delicious! Dog? Disgusting! But, notice, this is completely culturally determined. What is disgusting to an American might be a feast in South Korea.

There are, though, some elements of disgust that are more universal. One of these is that, once something has been deemed unclean, polluted, toxic, or contaminated, it not only remains that way, but it also passes on its disgusting quality to whatever it touches.

For instance, if I had in my possession a sweater regularly worn by Hitler, would you put it on? Highly unlikely. You’d feel dirty having that next to your skin. Or, if I were to drop a cockroach into a glass of juice then remove it, would you drink the juice? Of course not. Even if I filtered it numerous times, you’ll probably still balk at the idea of putting that into your body. Once polluted, always polluted. Hitler’s sweater will always be Hitler’s sweater. A “cockroached” glass of juice will always be a “cockroached” glass of juice.

Some things, once they are deemed disgusting or contaminated, permanently carry that quality with them. These things are even thought to be “contagious,” negatively affecting whatever they come into contact with.

But what about people?People who are deemed dirty or disgusting or contaminated.Does the same apply to them?

Do Sinners Make Jesus Unclean?

In a well-known example from the New Testament, the Jewish religious leaders grumbled and murmured when they saw Jesus eating with “sinners” (Luke 15:1). On another occasion, when these same leaders saw Jesus in the home of a tax-collector, sharing a meal with him and his fellow “sinners,” they asked his followers why their Rabbi would eat with such people (Matthew 15:11). And on still another occasion, “a woman in the city who was a sinner” actually wept on Jesus’s feet, wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with perfume. The Pharisee in whose house this happened said to himself that, if Jesus were truly a prophet, he wouldn’t let this kind of woman touch him (Luke 7:36-38).

Each of these are cases of disgust and contamination. The religious leaders are appalled that Jesus would let himself come into contact with unclean people, even to the point of letting that woman’s tears, hair, and lips touch his body.

The implication is clear: the uncleanness of these “sinners” will wear off on Jesus.Their contamination is disgusting.

But notice something very important: the religious leaders don’t even entertain the possibility that the reverse might be true. Rather than seeing these sinners as contaminating Jesus, why not see Jesus as purifying them? Why not? Because, as Richard Beck points out in his book Unclean, “The logic of contamination simply doesn’t work that way. The logic of contamination has the power of the negative dominating over the positive. [According to this logic,] Jesus doesn’t purify the sinners. The sinners make Jesus unclean.”

In the minds of the religious leaders, once contaminated, always contaminated. Moreover, once contaminated, always contagious. And, unfortunately, this isn’t just the theological and psychological mindset of religious leaders in the 1st century. It still dominates many minds and hearts in the church today.

Former Porn Producer

Let’s imagine a former adult film producer has left his career, become a Christian, and joined your church. Now at your congregation, laypeople regularly assist with parts of the service, such as the Lord’s Supper. Would you be OK with him serving you Holy Communion? Those hands, which had directed women and men to do all sort of sexual acts, would you be fine with those hands passing to you the body and blood of Jesus? As he stood there at the altar, would you still see him standing behind the camera?

How would you see this man: as contaminated or cleansed? Contagious or forgiven?

Or, we might ask this: when the early Christians met Paul, how did they see him? Did they look upon his hands as still stained with the blood of Christians? When they saw his feet, did they see them as the feet at which the killers of Stephen had laid their cloaks (Acts 7:58), or the beautiful feet which bring good news?

How did they see Paul: as contaminated or cleansed? Contagious or forgiven?

Well, that depends. If we’re working with the logic of the world, the logic of the negative dominating over the positive, then we would see the former porn producer as unclean, disgusting, contagious—just as an early Christian might have seen Paul as still a bloodthirsty, disgusting, contagious persecutor of the church. Once polluted, always polluted, right?

But if we’re thinking counterintuitively, if the cross of Christ is crucifying our minds and hearts to raise them to a new resurrection way of life, then we will see our brother or sister at the altar as a forgiven, pure, holy child of God, no matter what his or her past might be. A new creation. Just as the early believers evidently saw Paul.

This view of people is extremely counterintuitive. It’s a reversal of how we are prone to view life.Bugs make juice unclean; juice doesn’t make bugs clean.Sinners contaminate the church; the church doesn’t make sinners clean.So, our common, law-oriented, disgust psychology tells us.

But Jesus says otherwise. He turns our minds and hearts and worlds upside down: if anyone is in him, that person is a new creation. The old has passed away and the new has come. Not only does Jesus welcome sinners; he eats with them, lets them kiss his feet, dies for them, and even incorporates them into his very body. He calls them not only friends but his brothers and sisters.

Jesus and his gospel upend our deeply held convictions about disgust.The person he has called clean, holy, forgiven, and beloved—that’s who and what that person is.

]]>Is it OK for a Former Adult Film Producer to Serve Holy Communion?Slaying Monsters in Church: Why Baptism Should be Rated R for ViolenceTheological ReflectionsChad BirdFri, 11 Jan 2019 13:31:51 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2019/1/11/slaying-monsters-in-church-why-baptism-should-be-rated-r-for-violence560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c3895526d2a732e1e979584If we had eyes to see what really happens in a baptism, we’d treat them as
R-rated acts of violence. Not only is a person about to be killed. Not only
are we about to witness a drowning. Horrific monsters writhe in the water.
Dragons of the sea lurk therein. And a bloody battle, with crushed heads
and butchered bodies is about to go down. To treat baptism as cute or
sentimental or symbolic is a lie. Abandon all such foolish notions. Every
baptism is war.If we had eyes to see what really happens in baptisms, we’d treat them as R-rated acts of violence. Not only is a person about to be killed. Not only are we about to witness a drowning. Horrific monsters writhe in the water. Dragons of the sea lurk therein. And a bloody battle, with crushed heads and butchered bodies is about to go down. To treat baptism as cute or sentimental or symbolic is a lie. Abandon all such foolish notions. Every baptism is war.

It doesn’t matter if your church uses a gallon of water or a lake. At the bottom is an unseen drain, a trapdoor, which opens to suck down the person into a black sea teeming with evil, chaotic monsters, fanged and fiery and fierce.

@@When we baptize, we plunge a human being into the liquid front lines of a war.@@ A world of evil is arrayed against them. They are captive to the chaos, hearts chained to an inherited death. This child, or this adult, is entering an ocean known by many names: the primordial waters, the Red Sea, the Jordan. And they are about to endure the most intense conflict of their lives.

To grasp this, we need to enter the Old Testament mind, ancient pagan mythology, and the shared waters of creation, the exodus, and baptism.

Pagan Mythology and Biblical Reality

The prophets and psalms pull us into a submarine. They take us down, down, down, far beneath the surface of the waters, to witness the war. They use the images, well-known in their culture, of mythology. In Canaanite stories of creation, Yamm personifies the chaotic sea that the god Baal conquers. In the Bible, God divides the sea [Hebrew: yam] with his strength (Ps. 74:13). Again, in mythology, Baal slays the sea dragon known as Leviathan. But the psalmist sings that Yahweh crushed “the heads of Leviathan” (74:14). He also broke “the heads of the sea monsters in the waters” (74:13).

God, in fashioning the world, brings order out of the formless and void waters that he initially created. For creation to be as God intends it, war must happen. So, he’s killing the monsters. Slaying the water dragons. Crushing heads.

Creation’s waters are evil’s liquid grave.

But there’s even more. The crossing of the Red Sea is like Creation #2. Isaiah, again echoing mythologies well known in the culture, says to the Lord, “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way, for the redeemed to pass over” (51:9-10). At the Red Sea, God cut Rahab in pieces. He pierced the dragon. Not only the Egyptians drowned there; their corpses floated in a sea of carnage, reddened by the blood of dragons, shed by the razor-sharp sword of the Lord of hosts.

Creation and the Red Sea; dragons and sea monsters; blood and gore and war. What does all this have to do with baptism? Everything.

War in the Water

The entire biblical story of water and war comes to a head when Jesus steps into the Jordan to be baptized by John. As the crossing of the Red Sea was a replay of creation, so when Israel crossed the Jordan, it was a replay of the Red Sea. The narrative river flows from creation to the Red Sea to the Jordan. This river, though physically shallow, is unfathomably deep. When Jesus steps into the Jordan, he enters the vast black sea, churning with monsters, where Leviathan, Rahab, and the dragon lurk.

There stands John, the embodiment of the Old Testament, the last and greatest prophet, who pours the water of war upon head of Yahweh incarnate. Creation is replayed. The Red Sea happens once more. The Creator yet again, though this time as a man, crushes the heads of Leviathan and smashes the skulls of the sea monsters in the waters. And as he did at the Red Sea, the God of war cuts Rahab in pieces and pierces the dragon.

In one swift movement, as God stands in the Jordan, dripping wet, he unsheathes and swings his mighty celestial sword to behead evil, smash monsters, execute dragons, and thus wring order out of chaos. In response, the heavens open, the Father bears witness that this is his Son, and the Spirit alights upon the one who brings peace by ending war.

When people are baptized, time is transcended. They go back to the Jordan and the Jordan comes forward to them. In a single splash, or a single dunk, they enter the war. All rolled into one liquid moment is creation, the Red Sea, the Israelites’ crossing of the Jordan, Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan, his life, his death, his resurrection—all in one moment it happens. In a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, they in Christ and Christ in them sever the dragon’s head, they’re rescued from chaos, and recreated as co-victors with Jesus.

It’s beyond amazing what happens in baptism. This is a violent, life-altering altercation between chaos and order, good and evil, the Creator and all the forces of darkness in the watery deeps. @@We the baptized emerge as the sons of God, the daughters of God, surrounded by cherubim, wearing the crown of victory, and dragging behind us the dead and waterlogged bodies of defeated dragons.@@

That’s what happens in baptism.

***Much of what I’ve described here is depicted in the icon of the baptism of Jesus, where sea monsters are seen in the waters of the Jordan. For an excellent treatment of the icon and mythology, see “Theophany and River Gods” by Father Stephen De Young.

]]>Slaying Monsters in Church: Why Baptism Should be Rated R for ViolenceThree Ways to Fail Well in 2019Theological ReflectionsChad BirdSat, 29 Dec 2018 22:53:45 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/12/29/three-ways-to-fail-well-in-2019560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c27f9ec4ae2379d321d0bbfWe will all be failures in 2019. We don’t need prophets or crystal balls to
reveal this to us. Just stand in front of a mirror. Is the image staring
back the same image that’s always been there? Well, there’s the evidence.
New year, same you. The same you that’s failed, in ways big and small, your
entire life.We will all be failures in 2019. We don’t need prophets or crystal balls to reveal this to us. Just stand in front of a mirror. Is the image staring back the same image that’s always been there? Well, there’s the evidence. New year, same you. The same you that’s failed, in ways big and small, your entire life.

The sooner we embrace this realism, the better. Sure, we may drop a few pounds. Make a few extra dollars. But 99.9% of who we are will remain unchanged—including our uncanny ability to fail.

@@What we might do, instead of making resolutions about how we’re going to succeed, is to resolve how we might do well at failure.@@ If it’s going to happen anyway—and, unless you’re drunk or high or delusional, you know it’s true—then let’s learn how to fail successfully.

God doesn’t trust you. He doesn’t believe in you. He has less-than-zero faith in you. It’s not as if your life inspires him. He’s well aware of your pettiness, childishness, and irrational fears. He knows how mean and petty you are about the smallest and stupidest things. No one is applauding your moral virtuosity in heaven. If, as the Bible says, you shouldn’t put your trust in princes, in mortal man, then why in the world would God put his trust in you?

So, when you fail, embrace that failure as a reminder of why God doesn’t trust you. What he does do, however, is this: he shows mercy to you through that failure and despite that failure. The Lord doesn’t believe in you but calls you to believe in his Son. His love never fails. His mercy never flops. He will never fail you.

2. Take advantage of your failure as a golden opportunity to eat humble pie.

We all have a sweet tooth when it comes to the cake of pride. Pride in our accomplishments, yes. Pride in how well we’ve done for ourselves, yes. But mainly pride in the fact that we’ve outperformed others. Our house has more square footage. Our tastes are more refined. Our life a little less screwed up than that total loser two cubicles down. That is, until it’s not.

Some of you will divorce this year. Others will lose their jobs and maybe their homes. Your honor roll child will get a DWI. Something will happen that will reveal the cake of pride is a biohazard. It poisons your soul. When that happens, when failure falls like midnight upon your once bright life, take advantage of that opportunity to dish up a big piece of humble pie. Eat it willingly. Humility, C. S. Lewis reminds us, is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less. As the pie digests, remember that you are not God’s gift to humanity. You, like everyone, are rather a recipient of God’s gift to humanity—and that gift is named Jesus Christ. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble,” James tells us (4:6). And the grace of Christ is a feast divine.

3. Learn from your failure that everything you are and have is solely by grace.

Success, as enjoyable as it is, as good as it makes you feel, also gradually blinds you to the fact that everything you are and have is nothing but pure gift. The more successful you are, the easier it becomes to buy into the lie that you earned your place, you deserve respect, you got where you are by your own doing. There is no more dangerous time than when everything is going well in your life. Because it’s then that the little god within you, the idol of self, waxes stronger, breaking his arm patting himself on the back for how well he’s done in crafting such a fine life for himself.

So God comes along to crush that puny god. And he often uses the sledgehammer of failure to do it. Your fine life crumbles. Your idol of self is unmasked as a demonic lie. As much as this unveiling hurts, it’s also an extraordinary gift. Because it’s our Father’s way of reminding you that every good and perfect gift falls from heaven into your lap. It’s by grace you live, breathe, work, marry, have children, and do anything right or noble or good. Look around you: whatever you see that’s good, thank God for it. It’s his gift, not your entitlement. And when you fail, cherish that moment as a reminder that everything you are and have is solely by grace.

]]>Three Ways to Fail Well in 2019My Favorite 12 1/2 Books of This YearUncategorizedChad BirdMon, 17 Dec 2018 11:46:30 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/12/17/my-favorite-12-12-books-of-this-year560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c178588758d463b971b15dbIt was difficult to narrow the list down, but here are my 12 1/2 favorites
of the year.I read or listened to 75 books this year. About 1/4 were fiction, 3/4 nonfiction. I was definitely on a J. K. Rowling marathon. I read her Harry Potter series (7 books), A Casual Vacancy, and the Cormoran Strike series (4 books). My nonfiction reads took me into Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and various varieties of Protestantism. Some of my favorites didn’t fall into neat and tidy categories, such as Jordan Peterson and Richard Selzer. It was difficult to narrow the list down, but here are my 12 1/2 favorites of the year.

Insightful, creative, and written with prose that soars. I’d have nominated it for a Pulitzer. It’s that well written. If you happen to view life theologically, as I do, this book is a mine from which you’ll pull barrels of gold.

I don’t reread many books. Fewer still would I be willing to start rereading as soon as I finished them. This is one of those rarities. Combining religion, psychology, mythology, history, and commonsensical knowledge, Peterson offers a startlingly challenging viewpoint on how to live well on the borderline of chaos and order.

If you’re looking for a fresh perspective on pastoral care, as well as Christians caring for other Christians, try this book. As it turns out, the ancient book of Leviticus, with its focus on the relationship between priests and those ‘’outside the camp’’ due to disease, offers a paradigm for our interactions today with those suffering outside our ‘’camps’’ due to illness, PTSD, and a host of other issues.

In a church drunk on power, control, and political clout, muscling its influence around through the manipulation of every power structure available, riding the dragon while draped in the religious garb of the Lamb, this book is bound to make people angry. All the more reason to read it.

Is this a novel or a theological work, a narrative or a sermon? Yes, and more. Put suicide, ministry, adultery, eschatology, Gospel, Jesus, and curvy mistresses all onto the literary table, pour some wine, settle into your seat, and gaze in wonder at the feast that only Capon could prepare with such brilliance, wit, and profundity. Read my Foreword to the book here at Mockingbird.

A blunt and eye-opening portrayal of how our society of affluence and technology (as wonderful as that can be) has helped create an individualistic society where unity is shattered, and we spend much of our energy attacking each other. I thought it was going to be about the struggles facing troops returning from combat (and that was part of the message) but it was about much more.

I became acquainted with MacDonald through his fiction, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This was my first exploration of his theology, which is simultaneously challenging and encouraging. These are not sermons to lightly skim; they necessitate time and reflection and a willingness to question the veracity of one’s own beliefs. MacDonald is fierce and bold and compassionate, all at once. One can see why he was condemned in his day (and still today by many) as a theological outlaw. His rejection of all atonement theories, along with imputed righteousness, would land him outside the camp of orthodoxy. Hate him or love him, he is a theological force to be reckoned with. If you’re up for a challenge, look no further.

This book is both theological and practical. It beckons us back to the gift of the Sabbath and demonstrates how that looks in the life of a believer today. This work is a godsend to the bedraggled and a come-back-home call to the over-worked and under-rested church. This book was awarded Christianity Today’s Book of the Year in Spiritual Formation.

The twelve parables that Daniel and Erick discuss are a helpful sampling of the wide range of stories that Jesus told about the kingdom of God. Everything from seeds sown all over the place, to outrageous debts forgiven, to a religious heretic serving as first responder to a half-dead mugging victim. What you will not find, however, is any inkling that these stories are about you. Rather, the focus throughout remains on Christ. If you’re looking for a book to guide you into the wild and scandalous stories that Jesus told, this is it.

This narrative of a man with four names, who seemed also to have lived four lives, transports us to medieval Russia. With him as a child, we learn the art of healing. With him as a young man, we weep at his love and loss and inconsolable grief. We travel with him to Jerusalem, to the monastery, into his twilight years. A moving, kaleidoscopic journey of a story. One I will certainly reread.

This short book has had a long life. Written in the 4th century, it continues to speak wisdom and hope and life to the church of every age, including our own. This is my fourth or fifth time reading it. And won’t be my last. It is largely due to Athanasius that the church was rescued from the various and widely popular anti-trinitarian heresies of his day. He was said to be the man who stood against the world. If you’ve never read him, start here. You won’t stop.

This is the half book of my 12 1/2 books this year—due to its relative brevity. The attraction of Brother Lawrence, and his life of prayerful contemplation of the presence of God, is its simplicity. Worship within the prescribed services of the monastery seep into his labor in the kitchen. His whole life becomes a liturgy—not with complicated acts of spiritual labor or elaborate prayers, but short petitions for mercy, repetitive moments of reflection on the love of God, and the awareness of always living and working in the presence of God.

Follow me on Goodreads if you’re interested in keeping up with what I’m reading and what’s on my to-read list.

]]>My Favorite 12 1/2 Books of This YearThe Number 666 and God's Christmas MathTheological ReflectionsChad BirdThu, 13 Dec 2018 11:42:23 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/12/13/the-number-666-and-gods-christmas-math560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c1243c503ce6403d4cc039dWe do plenty of counting this time of year. Moms and Dads count how many
days they have left to swipe their Visa for gift purchases. Children count
how many of those presents lie colorfully wrapped beneath the evergreen
tree. Stores count profits. And surveying the hams, pecan pies, and oceans
of eggnog lavished before us, we all try not to count calories.We do plenty of counting this time of year. Moms and Dads count how many days they have left to swipe their Visa for gift purchases. Children count how many of those presents lie colorfully wrapped beneath the evergreen tree. Stores count profits. And surveying the hams, pecan pies, and oceans of eggnog lavished before us, we all try not to count calories.

But there’s also a strange, unexpected number that looms in the background of Christmas. It seems radically out of place. Yet there it is, skulking beyond the glittering lights and tinseled trees. It’s the number 666, the mark of the beast.

If there’s a time of year to grasp the significance of this number, it’s now. Because the birth of Jesus casts light on the dark meaning of 666. And, most importantly, the birth of God’s Son is the death of that number’s power over us.

The Holy Trinity of 777 and the Unholy Trinity of 666

In Revelation 13, John says that “the number of the beast” is “the number of a man; and his number is 666,” (v. 18). Throughout history, this number has been identified with everyone from the Roman emperor Nero to the Prophet Muhammed to—weirdest of all—President Ronald Reagan.

But 666 is not the number of a particular man. An individual. It’s the number of mankind, of humanity—a fallen and failing humanity that reflects the twisted image of the idolatrous beast rather than the image of God.

Here’s what I mean: throughout Revelation, we encounter recurring sevens. Seven is God’s number. It refers to completeness, perfection, totality. The Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is 777, if you will.

But there’s also an unholy trinity, aping the true God. It’s the unholy trinity of the dragon (Revelation 12), the beast from the sea (13:1-10), and the beast from the earth (13:11-18). Their number is 6 because it falls short of 7. It’s lags behind. It’s lacking. It symbolizes earthly imperfection. As G. K. Beale notes, “The repetition of six three times indicates the completeness of sinful incompleteness found in the beast. The beast epitomizes imperfection, while appearing to achieve divine perfection,” (We Become What We Worship, 262).

In other words, “The evil trinity 666 apes the Holy Trinity 777, but always falls short and fails,” (Torrance, The Apocalypse Today, 86). But 666 is also fallen humanity’s number. All those who worship untrue gods, who fear and love and trust in things more than the Lord, bear the number 666. They mirror the not-perfect, failing gods they worship. They image in their lives, thoughts, words, and actions the very imperfection, incompleteness, and darkened image of the gods whom they adore.

The number 666 encapsulates everything anti-God in the world and in idolatrous human hearts.

You might be thinking, “OK, but what does this have to do with Christmas?”Everything, that’s what.

God’s Strange Christmas Math

When Jesus is born, God puts into motion his strange, beloved math. He becomes his own image. He who crafted humanity in his own image and likeness becomes a human himself. The Son of the Father, who is “the image of the invisible God” becomes the Son of Mary, too (Col 1:15). God becomes man. The Creator a creator. When we see Jesus, we see the fulness of God made manifest (1:19). As Jesus tells Philip, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” (John 14:9).

And, when we see Jesus, we see our humanity made perfect. That little baby, suckling at his mother’s breast, is the only perfect, complete, and flawless human ever born into this world. Christ is the perfect 7 born into a world of imperfect 6’s: —the 6 of our twisted, idolatrous hearts meets the 7 of his heart wholly devoted to his Father. —the 6 of our dirty shame meets the 7 of his glorious joy. —the 6 of our far-from-perfect, incomplete, shattered lives meets the 7 of his divine and human perfection. —the 6 of the gods of this world meet the 7 of the God-made-man who comes to overthrow them.

Our 777-God so loved this 666-world that he sent his Son to work his strange Christmas math of grace and mercy. What we lacked, he added. Where we were incomplete, he completed us. @@Where we were falling and failing and falsely worshipping in our 666 lives, Jesus came to add his beloved one to our lives, to bring us into the 777 life of the Holy Trinity.@@

The Father’s math at Christmas is simple and profound: in this 1 child, 1 Savior, 1 perfect human, he takes the 6 of our lives and adds 1 Jesus to them. We become the 7 that mirrors him. As we kneel before the manger, we leave behind the 6 of idolatry to enter the 7 of true worship. We are made whole, the humans the Lord wants us to be, in this perfect human who draws us into the 777 life of the Trinity.

In Christ, gone is the mark of the beast, emblazoned on our foreheads (Rev 13:16), to be replaced by the name of our Father, written “on our foreheads” (Rev 14:1). We are tattooed as God’s own, those who bear his name, his number, his zealous and vivifying love. That is God’s Christmas math, who deep-sixes all evil and idolatry in his Son, to usher us into the 777 of his divine and undying life.

]]>The Number 666 and God's Christmas MathUnwrapping Four Hebrew Words Before ChristmasTheological ReflectionsChad BirdWed, 05 Dec 2018 12:46:15 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/12/5/unwrapping-four-hebrew-words-before-christmas560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c07c74d03ce6473e5b7cd56In these weeks leading up to December 25, our ears ring with the same
worn-out words: presents and trees; decorations and Santa; and, of course,
Visa and Amazon Prime. They’re all part of our common cultural vocabulary.
We know the definitions and connotations. There’s no need to unwrap them.In these weeks leading up to December 25, our ears ring with the same worn-out words: presents and trees; decorations and Santa; and, of course, Visa and Amazon Prime. They’re all part of our common cultural vocabulary. We know the definitions and connotations. There’s no need to unwrap them.

As the church gathers in worship, however, different words reverberate in readings, hymns, and homilies. These words beckon us to get dirty. They require some archaeology—to uncover the layers, brush off the dust, and search for clues as to their deeper meanings. These are Advent words. And because Advent is the most Old Testament of the church seasons, these words are steeped in Hebrew tradition.

@@Here’s a quick archaeological tour of four Hebrew words buried in the holy dirt of Advent.@@

Malak (Messenger)

Long-haired, long-bearded, grasshopper-and-honey-eating John the Baptist is The Advent Man. We hear much of him during these four weeks. John is the malak, the messenger, the voice of the one crying in the wilderness. The Hebrew noun is usually translated “angel,” because most of its occurrences refer to heavenly messengers. John is the one whom Malachi prophesied, “Behold, I send my messenger [malak], and he will prepare the way before me” (3:1; Luke 7:27).

Whether the Lord’s malak is from heaven or earth makes little difference, their vocation is the same: they direct us not to themselves but to the one whose message they voice. They are word-givers not attention-seekers. They decrease so that the Lord might increase. The malak of the Lord points us away from ourselves in repentance (see below), to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Shuv (Repent)

The watchword of the malak of God is shuv. When used literally, this Hebrew verb refers to the physical motion of turning, returning, or turning back. When John the Baptist calls people to repent, he is calling them not to an emotion but to a motion. To turn from sin and return to the Lord. But (and this is critical!), note where he does this: at the Jordan River. The Jordan is the border of the holy land, the river the Israelites crossed when leaving exile and captivity in Egypt to return to the promised land.

In a number of places in the OT, to shuv is to return from exile, from the land of slavery, back to the land of liberty. By preaching repentance at the Jordan River, and by doing a baptism of repentance in those same waters, John is calling Israel to shuv from exile, to return from the Babylon of their hearts, the Egypt of the soul, to the holy land of freedom and forgiveness. In Advent, the call remains the same: to shuv from captivity, to turn from our idols, return from our exile, to the Lamb of God who is sacrificed outside Jerusalem to restore us as citizens of the heavenly fatherland.

Midbar (Wilderness)

In Hebrew, the midbar, the wilderness, is more than a geographical location. It’s a theological location, a spiritual place, where demons lurk, temptation happens, and hearts are forever changed. That’s why John is the “voice of one crying” not in the city, not in the villages, but “in the wilderness” (Isaiah 40:3; Matthew 3:3). The midbar is the crucible of conversion.

Israel spent forty years in the midbar. Jesus spent 40 days in the midbar, being tempted by the devil. And John the Baptist stations himself there as the messenger of God, to call us to repent, that in the wilderness we might meet the Christ of Advent. In that spiritual place, Jesus comes to us, for here is “a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3) to lead us back home. We journey through death in the midbar, across the Jordan, and to Bethlehem, where we meet the Son who advents, who comes, to make us his own.

Zakar (Remember)

In Hebrew, to zakar, to remember, is not merely a head activity but a body activity. Remembrance is an action, a doing, not just a recollection of something we’ve forgotten. When Mary sings her song, the Magnificat, she says that God “has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy” (Luke 1:54). In her own psalm, she’s echoing Psalm 98:3, “He has remembered [zakar] his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel.”

For God to zakar his mercy, to remember his steadfast love, is for him to enact that mercy, to put his love into action. Just as he remembered Noah so that he dried up the flood waters (Gen 8:1), just as he remembered Rachel so that he opened her womb (Gen 29:22), so when God remembers to show mercy to us this Advent season, he does so not by sitting back and thinking about us. He incarnates that mercy in his Son. For God to zakar is to give, to help, to provide. And that giving, helping, and providing is wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a manger. Jesus is the zakar of the Father, his remembrance for us.

These four Hebrew words—malak, shuv, midbar, and zakar—are Advent words. God sent John the messenger, to call us to repent, to journey from the wilderness to Bethlehem, where he shows us what it means for him to remember mercy in the incarnation of his Son and our Savior.

]]>Unwrapping Four Hebrew Words Before ChristmasWhy You Should Never Throw a Party for GodTheological ReflectionsChad BirdSun, 02 Dec 2018 03:28:47 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/12/1/why-you-should-never-throw-a-party-for-god560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5c034e74f950b754a34c6fbcConsider yourself warned: if you plan a party for God—tidy up the house,
frost the cake, and send out RSVPs—you’re in for a rude awakening. He won’t
show up. Or rather, he will, but it’ll be a week or a month or even a year
after the scheduled date. The leftover cake will be molding in the trash,
the balloons wrinkled like old skin, and the guests gone about their
business, long before the Almighty raps his knuckles on your front door.Consider yourself warned: if you plan a party for God—tidy up the house, frost the cake, and send out RSVPs—you’re in for a rude awakening. He won’t show up. Or rather, he will, but it’ll be a week or a month or even a year after the scheduled date. The leftover cake will be molding in the trash, the balloons wrinkled like old skin, and the guests gone about their business, long before the Almighty raps his knuckles on your front door.

The Lord is perpetually late. He’s a non-punctual deity. Never throw a party for God.

There’s no watch on the Lord’s wrist. No iPhone in the back pocket of his blue jeans. He did create time; it was his idea. But for him “the right time” is never our time. From our perspective, he’s either way too early or—more usually—way too late.

Today, even as the church rolls into the time of Advent, we remember this frustrating truth: no clocks hang on heaven’s walls.

The Untimely Branch of David

We see an illustration of the Lord’s untimely ways in a verse from Jeremiah, which many churches will read this Sunday (33:14-16). The prophet begins, ironically, by talking about time: “in those days and at that time,” he says. So far, so good. We’re looking at a day and time when God will do something. Perhaps we’re wrong. Maybe he is going to be punctual after all.

But, no, far from it. What the Lord is going to do “in those days and at that time,” is to “cause a righteous Branch of David to spring forth,” (v. 15). In the Hebrew, it says, God will “cause a spout to sprout.” He will tsamach a tsemach. This action is not the issue, however, but the time this will happen. This sprout or branch will not begin to grow in the spring, when the sun thaws the earth, when seeds incubate and ascend through the warming soil. No, that would make sense. Rather, this branch will begin to spout in the dead of winter, in frozen soil, when there’s not a chance it will do anything but die.

In other words, Jesus, the Branch of David, will come at the wrong time. A seriously wrong time. And he’ll show up not days, not even years, but centuries late.

He’s the Branch of David, to be sure, from a royal family tree, but when Jesus is born David’s bones had been in the grave for almost a thousand years. Not only that, but Israel had been kingless for centuries. When David’s Branch was born, the party was long over. The decorations in the attic, the balloons airless. Israel wasn’t even free to have a king! It lived under Roman domination, just as it had lived under Greek hegemony before.

So, yes, the Branch showed up. Finally. But it was far too late. Israel’s garden was smothered by snow. Judah’s soil was frozen. The patch of holy ground that once had blossomed under the summer of Israel’s glory was now a sad, withered, dead acre of nothingness graffitied with the tracks of Roman jackboots.

But, from God’s perspective, the timing was perfect. @@When God plants a garden, he always goes to work in December.@@

Gardening in December

When you’re waiting around for the Lord to act, to hear your prayer, to heal your body, to heal your marriage, to pull you out of that dark place in which you find yourself—remember December.

When you’re increasingly frustrated by the Lord’s seeming deafness, when he doesn’t seem to care if you’re dead or alive, when your entire existence screams out with the Psalmist, “How long?!” remember December.

Remember that after the Father promised to come, to save, to plant Jesus the Branch in Israel’s soil, he came much, much later than anyone wanted or expected him to come—in December. Not only was his timing off, but he came in such an underwhelming, unpromising way, that it appeared as “hopeful” as a garden planted in snow and ice.

The Lord shows up in December. A tiny, vulnerable, swaddled Branch in the arms of a young mother. A mad king sought to slay him. Demons hounded his steps. The religious elite plotted his murder. And, in time, he was grotesquely executed in a barbaric show of legalized human depravity. Yet this December God knew what he was doing. He was doing things his way, in his time, and showing through it all that what seemed foolish was actually the wise revelation of God.

Remember December. The Lord’s watch doesn’t tick-tock to our timetables. He will act for you. He will act to save you. He will do his loving thing, whatever that is, for you. @@But there’s a good chance that when God begins to garden in your life, there will be snow on the ground.@@ But that’s okay, because Jesus the Branch knows a thing or two about making his appearance in December.

]]>Why You Should Never Throw a Party for GodThe Most Frightening Question God Can Ask UsDevotionsTheological ReflectionsChad BirdWed, 14 Nov 2018 11:43:03 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/11/14/the-most-frightening-question-god-can-ask-us560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5bec05770e2e72ba2e729733Of all the questions God might ask me, one in particular fills me with
dread. It’s important. It’s crucial. In fact, it might be the most
penetrating, vital question of all. But because my potential answer reveals
so much about me, because it makes me feel naked emotionally and
psychologically and spiritually, I’m afraid to respond. And, I suspect, you
are too.Of all the questions God might ask me, one in particular fills me with dread. It’s important. It’s crucial. In fact, it might be the most penetrating, vital question of all. But because my potential answer reveals so much about me, because it makes me feel naked emotionally and psychologically and spiritually, I’m afraid to respond. And, I suspect, you are too.

The question is this: What do you want me to do for you?

A mere nine words. Straightforward. No highfalutin language. But in that brief and seemingly simple question, I collide with an interior cosmos of chaos and confusion. A million desires come creeping out of the dark holes in my soul to fight for first place.

But I can’t evade the question. And neither can you. Because every day God puts it to us. We don’t hear his voice, but nevertheless his voice echoes within us. Asking, prying, confronting us: What do you want me to do for you?

Mercy or More?

In back-to-back episodes in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus asks that question (10:35-52). And he gets two very different responses.

First, the so-called Sons of Thunder, the brothers James and John, tell Jesus they want something from him. He responds, “What do you want me to do for you?” They want seats of honor, one on the right and one on the left, when Jesus himself sits on his glorious throne. Our Lord says, in essence, that he can’t give that, for those places are reserved for “those for whom it has been prepared.”

Second, immediately afterward, the blind beggar Bartimaeus cries out to Jesus to have mercy on him. Our Lord stops, the crowd tells the beggar to go forward, and Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” Teacher, he says, I want to regain my sight. His request is granted, and he begins to follow Jesus.

It seems to me that in these two episodes, a mystery is unveiled. All is not perfectly clear, but there is enough clarity to show us a bad way and a better way to answer God’s question. We might summarize it this way: @@The brothers, out of their fullness, sought more, while the blind man, out of his emptiness, sought mercy.@@

Wants and Needs

Notice that God does not ask, “What do you need me to do for you?” That would make more sense. After all, aren’t we supposed to recognize the difference between wants and needs? Don’t we teach our own children that vital difference? Listen, Johnny, I know you want chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast every day, but what you need is something else.

So why does God ask what we want instead of what we need? Because we are still children, still wanting the adult life-equivalents of chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast. And our Father, knowing this, is still trying to pry open our eyes so that we see the difference between our wants and needs. Or, rather, he’s pushing us to mature so that what we want is actually what we need.

More, More, More

And that’s why this question fills me (and you?) with such dread. Makes me feel naked before God. Because the little I know about myself is sufficient to demonstrate that, like the brothers, out of my fullness, I want more. I want more happiness. I want more financial security. I want more people to like me. I want less suffering and more easy living. I’m not asking to be enthroned at your right or left, Lord, but I would at least like a spot at the head table.

Out of my fullness, I want more. And so, in my answer to the Lord’s question, I acknowledge my spiritual immaturity. Still a baby crapping in my own spiritual diaper. Still so far to go before my wants are my needs, and my needs my wants. Still no Bartimaeus, but just one more son of thunder, booming my desire for more into God’s ears instead of crying out like a blind man for mercy.

Christian Maturity is Dependence

Our Father is certainly open to hearing all our prayers, even as he was open to James’s and John’s request. But he’s also, like a loving parent, not content to let us remain acting like an infant or toddler or teenager. He wants us to grow up, to mature into a deeper awareness of our true needs, and to make those needs also our wants.

He does this by bringing us, by and by, to a growing apprehension of our emptiness. @@True Christian maturity is not marked by independence but by a deep awareness of our dependence.@@ Rather than desiring to sit on a throne at Christ’s right or left, he wants us to sit in the dirt beside Bartimaeus. To realize, with the church at Laodicea, that we are not “rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” but that we are “wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked,” (Rev. 3:17). Rather than sons of thunder, he is reminding us that we are children of dirt in need of the rain of mercy that falls from his clouds of compassion.

“I want to regain my sight,” Bartimaeus said. Yes, Lord. Open our eyes, too, that we may see you and you alone standing there. And in you may our wants and needs coalesce. If we are going to want more, let it be more of you and less of ourselves.

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks. I want you to show me how empty I am in myself, and to fill that emptiness with the fullness of your presence. I want to take up my cross and follow you. I want to desire what you want, and want what you desire. I want to die and rise with you, to be conformed to your image, to set my mind not on earthly things but on things above.

I want, O Lord, to desire nothing more than your mercy, that is, to desire you.

]]>The Most Frightening Question God Can Ask UsA Cynic Walks into a ChurchTheological ReflectionsChad BirdThu, 08 Nov 2018 11:09:32 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/11/8/a-cynic-walks-into-a-church560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5be3959b40ec9ad9e2f93547He was 30 years old. A good head on his shoulders. A fine education under
his belt. He was what we today might call a millennial with a Master’s
degree and upward mobility. He paid the bills as a highly gifted public
speaker who kept his audience on the edge of their seats. He was about 30 years old. A good head on his shoulders. A fine education under his belt. He was what we today might call a millennial with a Master’s degree and upward mobility. He paid the bills as a highly gifted public speaker who kept his audience on the edge of their seats.

He was also religious, but was cynical about Christianity.How could he ever discover truth in that temple of fairytales?

One day, however, he did visit a church. A well-known pastor stood in the pulpit. He observed the worship. Listened to the sermon. But when the young man met the preacher after the service, he found him unfriendly and a bit on the pompous side. This guy may have had the theology of angels but he had the personality of a jackass. He smelled of churchly arrogance, as if his creed put him above others, especially this millennial-aged man who had rejected Christianity on rational grounds.

So this smart, educated cynic walked away with a sour taste in his mouth. He would never waste his time in worship again. And, as a result, this young man, named Augustine, faded from history. Never would he be known by the world as the Bishop of Hippo, author of The City of God, and the foremost influential teacher of western Christianity.

That, at least, is what might have happened.

We could very easily have never heard of Augustine, whom we call Saint Augustine. He would simply be one of the millions of forgotten names in the dark mists of history. Had that pastor, whose name is Ambrose, been a religious jerk to young Augustine, had Ambrose been overbearing, full of himself, and condescending to this 30-year-old, then not only the history of the church, but the very history of the world would have been different.

As it was, thank God, we do know Augustine. We know him as a saint, bishop, author, and spiritual leader. We know him because when this confused and cynical young man stepped into Ambrose’s church, he found this pastor to be a kind, loving, welcoming man of God. Reflecting years later upon the day he met him, Augustine says, “I came to love [Ambrose], not at first as a teacher of the truth, which I had utterly despaired of finding in Your church, but for his kindness towards me,” (Confessions, Book 5:13).

As an orator, a man of words, Augustine was impressed by the eloquent preaching of Ambrose. He was impressed, too, by his biblical interpretation. But it wasn’t his sermons, his doctrine, or his exposition that first won the heart of this church-father-to-be. It was his kindness.

The North Pole Church

Like many of you, I am a member of a tradition that has a rich and deep doctrinal heritage. Indeed, the man after whom my own denomination is named, Martin Luther, was tremendously impacted by Augustine, whom he quotes more than any other church father. Whole libraries could be filled with our works on church history, homiletics, exegesis, and systematic theology.

All of this is good, indeed, a gift of God. But if a modern-day Augustine walked into one of our churches, none of this would make much of an impact on him if he encountered dogmatic bigheadedness, churchly elitism, and the spiritual equivalent of the north pole. If the “Ambrose” he met was unkind and ego-obese, chances are our “Augustine” would never return. And, let’s be honest, who could blame him?

Diabolical Dichotomies

So my point is that we need to have less doctrine and more love in church?We need to be more concerned about extending kindness and less about extending truth?What matters is not the creed we confess but the grace we show?Hell to the No. God forbid. Nope, those are diabolical dichotomies.It’s not an either/or. It’s not even a both/and.It’s something different.

@@Never underestimate the impact it makes on our treatment of people when, looking into their faces, we see not a cynic, a doubter, or even a stranger, but a son or daughter of God.@@ We look into the eyes of one for whom Christ sweated drops of blood and wore a crown of thorns. We gaze into the countenance of a person fashioned in the image and likeness of God. We see the beautiful creation of the Father, the blessed recipient of the Son’s atonement, and the heart in which the Spirit desires to abide. This young man or woman, this seeker, questioner or cynic, this potential new Augustine, is the particular embodiment of the world which God so loved that he gave his only-begotten Son.

If that doesn’t make an impact on how we treat people, what will?

There is no divorce between doctrine and life, preaching and loving. The teachings we confess to be true are like trees waiting to drop the sweet fruits of love and kindness and hospitality. The more that we hear the law, the more we recognize others as those who, like us, are torn and tattered by the wounds of sin and brokenness. And the more we hear of Christ’s grace, the more we recognize them as those who, also like us, have our names traced on the very heart of God.

O God, unite our hearts to fear your name, and to love your children.

Daring to Love

Augustine came to love Ambrose for his kindness towards him. Thanks be to God that, of all the churches into which Augustine might have gone, he stepped into a congregation in Milan where this man of God served the flock of Christ. And thanks be to God that Ambrose, who is one of the hymn-writers of the early church, knew that love itself is a kind of hymn, a song of mercy, that enters the ears and echoes within the heart to make music that draws the soul to stay.

Thank you, O Lord, for Augustine.Thank you, O Lord, for Ambrose.@@Thank you, O Lord, for all who know that the course of history is often changed by someone who dares to love.@@

Tiny humans with giant heroes. Cape-wearing, shield-bearing saviors of our woebegone race. My wife and I smiled, dropped candy in their bags, and watched them walk away into a future brimming with true heroic possibility.

Who will these little ones grow up to be? God only knows. But one thing is certain: whoever they grow up to be, their growth will be stunted until a moment of awkward revelation dawns upon them. It will be stunted until one day they awake—truly awake—to gasp in knowing horror at the countenance of an anti-hero reflected back in the mirror of their lives.

Thank God for heroes: they inspire us to be better, to help others, to live and work for the good of our race. And thank God for villains, too: they incarnate our shadow side, our nocturnal soul, the dragon within us that must incessantly have its throat slit on the altar of repentance.

When We See Evil

Here’s what I think about: whenever school lockers are splashed with blood, whenever churches or synagogues or mosques echo with the blasphemy of gunfire, whenever university girls are roofied and raped—I think, “The one who did this evil, that person is inextricably linked, body and blood, mind and soul, not to some other race or species but to my own humanity.” Our own humanity! Be they man or woman, old or young, racist or religionist, drunk or sober, that person shares 99.9% of our DNA.

What have they done? They’ve ridden astride the same god-hating, life-destroying, inhumane dragon slithering and breathing fire within us. And you know what? I hate it. It scares the hell out of me. And—most importantly—I damn sure believe it.

And you better, too. Unless you want to live a stunted life pregnant with lies.

Bless You, Prison!

Seven years into his imprisonment as a political prisoner in the gulags of Soviet Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn lay in a hospital bed stricken with a malignant tumor. He had every reason to devote the entirety of his thought to how horrible his conditions were, how unjust his incarceration was, how evil his captors were. But there, on that bed, he went down a different path. He came to grips with who he really was.

He writes, “I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings.” He realized that “in the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good” (Vol. 2:615).

There, unjustly imprisoned, encircled by the ugly horror of these hellish camps, he turned his eyes inward. He gazed backward over the years of his life, to see that villainous though Stalin was, villainous though the executioners were, nonetheless, “Were we any better?” And due to that epiphany of self-knowledge, when he looked back on his imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn would sometimes shock those around him by uttering this benediction: “Bless you, prison!”

Spelunking Our Souls

Human maturity is not only growing up but growing wise. @@If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then the fear of the evil of which we are capable is a close second.@@ Knowing ourselves, spelunking the caverns of our souls, and being truthful about what vile and violent things we spy there, is indispensable if we shall flourish as lights in this world.

It’s indispensable because it’s the doorway to a necessary death. Step inside, follow me, and let us die to the people we are, and could become. We may never murder a congregation of worshippers, but we will hate a person—and thus spill their blood on the floors of our hearts. We may never rape a woman, but we will use razor-sharp words that penetrate her soul. Dear God, the things we could do—and have done. Have mercy on us. Lead us through that doorway that we may die with you.

It’s a violent, cataclysmic death. The foe within us doesn’t play possum. He wars like a madman. But inside that doorway is a Roman cross. Down goes the hammer, nails through flesh, so that we are pinned atop of Jesus. Skin to skin with God, the crimson fruit of his veins and ours commingling in a pool of hope. We who are evil die alongside he who is good. And a good death it is because unless we die with him, there is no resurrection to new life. New hope. A new man, a new woman, a new person recreated in the image of God’s Son and our Brother.

We return to the place of death and life repeatedly as the Spirit draws us into the habit of repentance. A new way of life. An ongoing killing of the dragon within that the Lamb might reign on our soul’s throne.

Bless you, prison! Bless you, villains! For in you and through you we see who we are if left to our own twisted and manipulative ways. But you meet us there, God of Life, to crucify and vivify us. To empty and fill us. You refashion us as stars in this dark world that we might sparkle with the brilliance of your mercy, and—as a star once did—point to a manger where lies the infant hope of the world.

]]>Waking Up as a DragonThe Reformation, Cancerous Tumors, and a 7th c. ProphetTheological ReflectionsChad BirdSat, 27 Oct 2018 23:50:25 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/10/27/the-reformation-cancerous-tumors-and-a-7th-c-prophet560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5bd4f4c9f4e1fc418180d1d7In churches that celebrate the Reformation, we usually hear this verse
thrown about at the annual religious shindig: “The righteous shall live by
faith.” It’s a compact little creed. A good word.In churches that celebrate the Reformation, we usually hear this verse thrown about: “The righteous shall live by faith.” It’s a compact little creed. A good word.

But, for most of us, we have no idea of the harrowing, violent, 7th century BC context in which this phrase was born.

In the late 600’s BC, Babylon was rising as the biggest, meanest dog on the cosmic block. The world superpower. With horses swifter than leopards and keener than wolves, these warriors tear through the earth, destroying every opponent. Fortresses only make them laugh and sneer. They swoop down like eagles on their prey. And now Jerusalem, God’s city, is about to be in their talons.

The prophet Habakkuk spies them coming. And he cries out to God (1:1-4; 12-17). He asks, “How long?” He laments that the Lord is sitting on his hands, letting this wicked and unjust enemy maul everything and everyone in sight. Why is God silent when this evil nation swallows up the peoples? Where is the Lord, the God of Israel, in their hour of deepest need?

Finally, Habakkuk says that he will stand like a watchman on the tower to wait and see how God will respond (2:1). And the Lord’s answer soon arrives. He says to record the vision he’s about to give. In fact, for good measure, write it in huge block letters so that you can read it on the run.

Then God says two things. Two very important things. He makes a contrast between the person of unfaith and the person of faith.

First, the man of Babylon, the evildoer, the unbeliever, the worshipper of false gods, is puffed up. The Hebrew word is related to a tumor, which is swollen, malignant, about to burst and ooze its poison everywhere. This man of unbelief has a soul like a massive, cancerous tumor. Nothing is right within him (2:4a).

Second, the righteous, the believer, the one whose God is Yahweh, will live by his faith (2:4b). His trust is in the true God, and the true God is his trust. This verse, “the righteous will live by his faith,” is quoted directly in the NT three times (Rom 1:17; Gal 3:11; Heb 10:38). That doesn’t happen with many OT verses. So, yes, it’s kind of a BIG DEAL.

But—and this is my main point—remember the context in which this bold word is spoken: the righteous will live by his faith, by what he does not see, because his eyeballs tell him that all hope is shot to hell. His eyes see the Babylonians coming, with murder in their hearts, blood on their tongues, and untold destruction in their wake.

What do Habakkuk and Israel have? Nothing but the word of God. Nothing but the promise of God. Nothing but God himself. They have the vision that Yahweh gives, the words of hope he utters. And that, amazingly, is enough.

Their eyes see an open yawning grave but their ears hear the faint whispers of Easter.

So, this Reformation (and all times), when we hear this verse, “The righteous will live by his faith,” remember that it wasn’t penned by a theology professor in some German university. It wasn’t conceived in a lazy, pacific environment by someone engaged in deep religious reflection about life and whatnot. No, it was uttered by God when his people faced a violent, ferocious enemy bearing down on them with bloody swords and flesh-piercing spears. It was a word that whispered life and hope when everything else screamed doom and death.

The Gospel of Christ, the Good News, is that the righteousness of God is ours by faith. When the Babylons of our own evil deeds, shameful acts, and soul-destroying decisions bear down and beat down on us, when all hope of salvation and life and peace seems shot to hell, we live by faith in the Savior who forgives, redeems, restores—and has kicked Satan’s ass once and for all.

We stand, with Habakkuk, like a watchman on the tower, our hands shading our eyes, scanning the horizon. We see ourselves surrounded by enemies. Death stalks on every side, even within us. But we wait, we hope, we are all ears. Because those ears hear the word of God that says he is for us, he is with us, he is mighty to save. And by faith in that word that comes from the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit, we live.

]]>The Reformation, Cancerous Tumors, and a 7th c. ProphetWhen We're Mad at God, How Do We Pray?PsalmsTheological ReflectionsChad BirdMon, 22 Oct 2018 11:24:54 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/10/22/when-were-mad-at-god-how-do-we-pray560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5bcdae6424a694be07d21488If our prayers were hooked up to a polygraph during certain seasons of our
lives, we’d be revealed as liars.If our prayers were hooked up to a polygraph during certain seasons of our lives, we’d be revealed as liars.

We pray, “Our Father...” but feel like God’s a dead-beat dad.We sing, “What a friend we have in Jesus,” but think he’s become our foe.We mouth words that magnify the Lord when we’re really mad at him.

@@How do we pray to the God who seems blind to our pain, deaf to our weeping, mute to our pleading?@@ It’s by no means an ivory-tower theological question. It’s as real as the weight we’ve lost from the stress of our divorce. As real as the bottle of antidepressants on our nightstand. We believe in him. We love him. But every voice inside us and every shred of evidence outside us points to his abandonment of us in our hour of deepest need.

So, how do you pray to God when you want to scream, “Where the hell are you?”

The Church Gets an “F” When it Comes to Teaching Lament

In the church today, with rare exception, we’ve failed miserably when it comes to answering that question for suffering people. @@We teach prayers appropriate for sipping tea with gray-haired spinsters when we need prayers at home in the religious equivalent of a barroom brawl with God.@@ We’re like people from the South who say “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir” to God and hold the door open for good ole Almighty when he steps inside to wreck our lives.

What’s more, our hymns and songs are almost exclusively focused on praise and encouragement and victory and other positive themes (this song, “Dark,” by Haley Montgomery is a fantastic exception). And even when we speak or sing the psalms on Sunday, the PG-13 and R-rated ones rarely if ever make it into our hymnals or worship folders. And don’t even get me started about the fact that the only tiny clump of verses we hear from Lamentations (“…great is your faithfulness,” etc. 3:23) is about .05% of a book that’s mainly berating God for stomping upon, spitting upon, and making Jerusalem hell on earth.

Pastors, leaders, and musicians—we need to do better, much better, at teaching suffering people how to pray to the God they’re mad at, feel betrayed by, and think has forgotten them. In short, we must recapture the practice of lament.

Four Suggestions for Recovering Lament

I have a few concrete suggestions, and I welcome readers to add more in the comment section below. These, at least, will get us started on the road to recovering the biblical practice of lament.

1. Stop Pretending You’re Happy with God. The God to whom we pray doesn’t want brown-nosers. He hasn’t made us fakes. He’s made us children. And children often get mad at their dad. It’s not only okay to be upset with our Father, confused by him, or feel like he’s sleeping while we’re hurting, but completely expected. We are emotional creatures. God made us that way. He didn’t create stoics. We’re going to experience a whole range of emotions, especially when our lives are falling apart. And our Father expects us to pray emotionally when we talk to him.

2. Pray the Psalms of Lament. You’d never know it from our hymnals today, but about 40% of the OT Hymnal (the Psalms) is lament. About 60 of the 150 psalms are individual or corporate laments. My suggestion: immerse yourselves in the psalms. Here is a chart that will take you through all 150 per month. These ancient prayers will put words in your mouth that express the darkest emotions in your heart. You’ll say things to God that are true, but sound on the verge of irreverence. But that’s okay, because the psalms are God’s gift to us—his words to us that become our words back to him.

3. Pastors and Worship Planners: Have Services of Lament. In modern history, the closest some of our churches have come to having a true service of lament was immediately after 9/11. That was 17 years ago. When hurricanes or floods or fires or tornadoes strike, schedule a service of lament for the congregation and invite the community. If, God forbid, there’s a school shooting in your city, have a service of lament. On the anniversaries of disasters, have a service of lament. Use the psalms or write an appropriate lament for the situation (such as this one for hurricane victims). People learn how to pray, instinctively, by how they worship. If our worship is never focused on lament, how are believers to learn how to pray laments?

4. Use Lament in Individual Cases of Pastoral Care. Pastors, especially, when you’re providing care for people going through a divorce or serious illness, battling addiction, suffering loneliness or despair or guilt or shame, teach them how to lament from the psalms. Give hurting people the structure they need from these prayers when their own lives feel like they’re swirling in chaos. We need peace, yes. We need forgiveness, yes. We need hope, absolutely. But we also need wounded language, bleeding prayers, that give our broken hearts nouns and verbs by which to address the God we’re angry with, disappointed in, or feel has thrown us away like trash.

@@We have a long way to go to recover lament in the church today, but these four suggestions are a start.@@ If you compose songs or hymns, I’d urge you try writing a rhymed lament that’s as bold and raw as one of the psalms. If you’re a preacher, don’t shy away from biblical texts that are in this genre.

There’s a time for “Amazing Grace” and a time for Lamentations. We neglect the latter to our own spiritual detriment. Together, as the church, let’s relearn how to lament.

Our broken hearts need that ancient voice.

]]>When We're Mad at God, How Do We Pray?A Lament for Hurricane VictimsSufferingPsalmsChad BirdSun, 14 Oct 2018 00:07:58 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/10/13/a-lament-for-hurricane-victims560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5bc28490e5e5f08331b0735dWe cannot rush through sorrow. Walking through pain and loss and grief is
like walking through water—slow, hard, and exhausting. It takes time. And
it takes a toll on us. We feel trapped in confusion, surrounded by chaos.We cannot rush through sorrow. Walking through pain and loss and grief is like walking through water—slow, hard, and exhausting. It takes time. And it takes a toll on us. We feel trapped in confusion, surrounded by chaos.

From ancient times, God’s people have turned to lament to give voice to their grief, to call upon a seemingly silent God. Lament gives structure in the midst of chaos. It gives us the language of the languishing. In the Bible, such laments often take the form of the alphabet, where each verse progresses from the Hebrew alphabet’s “A to Z.” These acrostic laments, as they’re called, help us organize our grief and structure our sorrow. More importantly, they give us words when all speech seems to fail us.

Here is a lament I’ve written especially for victims of hurricanes. May it be for you, for your family, or for your church, a way to put into prayer the anguish of your souls.

A Lament for Hurricane Victims

Awake, God, why are you sleeping?Anguish and anxiety stab at the walls of our soul.

Bereft of hope, our eyes see only midnight’s stare.Bright days of joy have sunk beneath the dark waters.

Cries arise from the rubble of shattered dreams.Crevices widen that threaten to swallow us up.

Dear God, why are your lips silent?Death and desolation envelop us on every side.

Every street is a river, every home a swamp.Evening and morning, we wade through muddy waters.

Forget us not, O Lord, for we are your children.Find us, save us, remember us for your name’s sake.

Gray skies overhang us, black clouds sneer down.Gone is our strength, for we are beaten on every side.

Help us, dear Father, do not stand afar off.Hasten to rescue us, lest we sink beneath the waters.

Instead of laughter, weeping is our soul’s song.Icy cold has crept into the cracks of our hearts.

Joy is a memory and pain dogs our every waking hour.Jubilation is trampled into the mire of the streets.

Killing waves have devoured the lives of those we loved, Kidnapped by foes wearing liquid masks.

Look down from heaven and see!Liberate your people from the ocean of despair!

Mothers’ arms hold only the phantom of lost children,Maimed and broken bodies lie in hospitals and morgues.

You, O Lord, have promised never to walk away from us.Yesterday, today, tomorrow, calm the troubled waters of our souls.

Zero in on your suffering people, the apple of your eye, andZealously, fervently, hold us till the storm is past.

]]>A Lament for Hurricane VictimsThe Two Reasons Our Past Can Be ChangedTheological ReflectionsChad BirdSun, 07 Oct 2018 11:46:12 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/10/7/the-two-reasons-our-past-can-be-changed560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5bb9f0e59140b70483307494At twenty minutes till nine, on the day she was to be married, Miss
Havisham received a letter from her fiancé that hijacked the rest of her
life. He was standing her up at the altar. And, in that moment, she chained
herself to the past.At twenty minutes till nine, on the day she was to be married, Miss Havisham received a letter from her fiancé that hijacked the rest of her life. He was standing her up at the altar. And, in that moment, she chained herself to the past. Every day, for decades, her soiled and tattered wedding dress was her sole attire. She had every clock in the house frozen at 8:40 AM. And the wedding cake, once resplendent, lay forever uncut and uneaten, gathering cobwebs atop the kitchen table.

Miss Havisham is a character in Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. She may be fictional, but let’s not fool ourselves into saying she’s not a real person. She’s more real than we care to admit.

We may not wear the same outward clothing every day, but inwardly draped over our hearts are smeared disappointments, stained hopes, soiled relationships, tattered dreams. We all have moments in our past that we never really seem to get past. There’s that “8:40 AM,” when the hands on the clock of our lives stopped. And try as we might, we can’t seem to get the clock ticking again.

You can’t change the past, they say. And, in one way, that’s obvious. We can’t make it 1980 again. But it’s also not wholly true. The past can, in fact, be changed, for two reasons. 1. Because the past is never truly past to us. 2. Because the past is certainly not past to the creator of time itself.

If there’s something from your own past you wish you could change—and who doesn’t have something like that?—then read on.

The Past Is Never Truly Past to Us

First, let’s get a grip on the fact that the past is never truly past to us. It’s still with us, alive and active and influential within us, in the form of memory. Your child may have died 15 years ago, but that yesterday is still as real as today. Your divorce may have been finalized 5 years ago, but 2013 is just as active within you as 2018. You may have moved on, as we say, but you travel forward with the luggage of personal tragedy in tow. These hurts and disappointments and hard lessons don’t simply disappear. Like scars, they are cut into your soul.

Our present is, therefore, the current embodiment of our past. Who we are today is the accumulation and incarnation of all our yesterdays. We are not past the past; it’s just as alive today as we are.

Because of that, if we could change our today, we could also change our yesterday.

We actually do this all the time, but rarely realize it. How often do we look back on a very dark and depressing time in our lives? While we were going through it, it was awful, heartbreaking, joyless. Nothing but bad, 100% terrible. Then, years later, with some distance between then and now, we look back and realize how that event shaped us in positive ways. We grew up. We learned from our mistakes. We became more humble. We started to appreciate life more. If we hadn’t gone through that horrible time, we wouldn’t be who we are today.

What have we just done? We’ve rewritten our past. Like a novelist who, in the course of writing her novel, goes back and edits Chapter One to fit better with later events in the story, we’ve gone back to edit our own Chapter One or Three or Seven. Yes, it’s already done, but we’re not. The events are irretrievable, lost to time, but we are not. We are our past. And as we relive that past in our memory, as we rethink those dark times, reevaluate who we are as a result of them, things change because we have changed. All of a sudden, that dark epoch in our lives has small glints of hope that were not there before. Today has altered yesterday.

This is even more profoundly true when we come to realize what God wants to do for us. Because the past is certainly not past to the author and creator of time itself.

The Past Is Never Truly Past to God

God’s wrists are not handcuffed to the clock. He can alter our yesterday as easily as he can change our tomorrow. For him 1970 and 2020 and 2018 are all one big Today. @@Although God is active in chronological time, he works in Christological time.@@

In Christ, God’s Son, yesterday, today, and tomorrow all collapse into one. He holds in himself everything from the beginning to the end of the world. Yes, he was born in time as a man, but the first man, Adam, was already made in his image. Past Eden mimicked future Bethlehem. Yes, he was crucified in time, but he was also the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. So from the beginning, he’s also the end. And from the end, he’s also the beginning.

What happens when we are united with Christ in baptism? God places us within the author of time itself. And in that moment, and in all moments thereafter, our understanding of yesterday, and its impact on us today, undergoes a profound shift. Our past is forever changed.

Our mistakes, our deprivations, our shames, our indecencies, are no longer ours but Christ’s. I cannot emphasize this enough. Our past ceases to be private property. It’s now God’s territory. Baptism transfers ownership of our personal stories to Jesus. Our life story becomes his life story, and his life story becomes our life story. He in us, and we in him. And we swap stories.

His ownership of our lives, enacted in baptism, initiates a life-altering, past-changing perspective on who we are and who we’ve been. We become intertwined with Christ in God. Our lives are hidden in him and revealed in him. @@When we look back on our past, we see Christ becoming the subject of all our misdeeds, the object of all our sufferings, the doer of all our good.@@ He becomes our past. And in him, we become new creations with completely different stories. Every chapter of our lives is rewritten in God.

Our past becomes Christ’s present. Our yesterday his today. And he who is full of love for us, fills our lives—past, present, and future—with that creative love.

Therefore, we can change our past. Or, rather, God in Christ changes it. Our yesterday? Christ. Our today? Christ. Our tomorrow? Christ. He who is not bound by time, but free in love, freely loves us into a life in which all our dark yesterdays now glimmer with the illumination of his transformative mercy.

]]>The Two Reasons Our Past Can Be ChangedOur Fingerprints Are All Over the Crimes of the WorldTheological ReflectionsChristianity and CultureChad BirdWed, 26 Sep 2018 00:59:28 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/9/25/our-fingerprints-are-all-over-the-crimes-of-the-world560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5baad28571c10b96e75168e6If we make a list of the moments in our lives that have shaped us as
individuals, our list will comprise good and bad things we’ve done. On the
“Good List” might be getting married, having children, earning a degree. On
the “Bad List” might be going through a divorce, betraying a friend,
getting a DWI. Things we do, actions we take, alter the course of our
lives. They shape us (and sometimes warp us) into the people we’ve become.If we make a list of the moments in our lives that have shaped us as individuals, our list will comprise good and bad things we’ve done. On the “Good List” might be getting married, having children, earning a degree. On the “Bad List” might be going through a divorce, betraying a friend, getting a DWI. Things we do, actions we take, alter the course of our lives. They shape us (and sometimes warp us) into the people we’ve become.

This is right. But it’s only half-right. There’s a whole other, darker side.

It’s not so much the things we’ve done (good and bad) that have profoundly molded us into the people we are, but the things we have not done. Indeed, I would argue that what we deem our worst deeds—the thing we do—are but the final and inevitable byproduct of years upon years of things we didn’t do. Or that others didn’t do for us.

What did that wife not do, all those years, that led to her husband walking out after 25 years of marriage? And what did he not do that brought him to this point of betrayal?

What did that father not do, all those years, that culminated in his children writing him out of their lives? And what did his children not do that made them so dishonor him?

What did that boy not do, all those years, that led him to think sexually assaulting a girl was okay? And what did others—his family, his friends, his classmates—not do that helped create or reinforce an environment where such assaults happen?

These are uncomfortable, and potentially inflammatory, questions, but they need to be asked. Because it’s not enough simply to point fingers at others. God knows there’s more than enough of that.

The good we’ve left undone, the truth we’ve left unsaid, the love we’ve left ungiven, the attention we’ve left unshown, have a profound impact on those around us. And the more we contemplate the limitless array of these individual sins of omission, the more we have to face the hard truth that every good we’ve not done has helped to create or foster every evil done in our society today.

So ask yourself the questions you don’t want to ask, much less answer. Like: how far has the ripple effect of my own self-centered life extended? To my spouse? My children? My spouse’s friends and their spouses? My children’s friends? My coworkers? My coworkers’ families?

Consider the following scenario: Suppose I’m a boss who neglects to care for my employees. One of my workers, Carl, hates his job as a result. He works hard and I show him no respect. I don’t necessarily do any evil to him. I don’t yell at him, belittle or insult him. I just act like he’s a tool in my company, not a person. So Carl goes home every night half-angry, half-depressed, to his wife, Julie. Over time, their marriage suffers. He’s so stuck in his head that he neglects her. And, Julie, in turn, feels unloved and so neglects him. Their increasingly frigid marriage spills over into the kid’s lives, who carry the negativity to school around teachers, friends, and teammates.

On and on the effects go. How far? Who knows? But this we do know: my sins of omission, as a boss, don’t stop at the door of the business. They leak into the marriage, the family, the school, the community. All of this not because of any outward evil action I’ve done, but the good I’ve left undone. My sinful DNA and iniquitous fingerprints are on the cubicle, the kitchen counter, and the school locker.

@@It’s high time we acknowledge, in our culture of victimhood, that we are all perpetrators.@@ Perpetrators by omission. Failing to forgive and thus trapping others in cages of guilt. Failing to speak the truth and thus leaving others chained to lies. Failing to love, to be charitable, to put the best construction on situations, and thus leaving others wallowing in shame, neglect, and scandal. Failing to treat women as daughters of God, created in his image, queens of creation, and thus, by our omission, bolstering the twisted image of them as objects of lust and dominance and violence.

@@Until we can look in the mirror and see the person reflected therein as a particular embodiment of what’s wrong with the world, then we are living a lie.@@ Our fingerprints are all over the crimes of the world.

This acknowledgment, this confession, when faced with brutal honesty, is unbearable.But it is not unredeemable.

This is where the church offers a unique gift to the world—one the world can never give itself. Because while we agree that we are all, every one of us culpable, we also offer a way out to the guilty. This “way out” is actually a “way in.” It’s the way in to a different mode of being, a different way of living in this world, a different way of seeing ourselves.

The Christian sees himself or herself as one just as guilty as the rest of the world. But we see ourselves not just as what’s wrong with the world, but in the One by whom the world has been redeemed. And that one, ironically, is the God who became everything that’s wrong with the world on our behalf.

The apostle Paul says that we preach Christ crucified. In other words, we preach the God who became our lack of love, became our sins of omission, became all the good we didn’t do, in order to do good for us and to us. That “good for us” is forgiveness for our failures as parents, spouses, bosses, friends. That “good for us” isn’t just a clean slate—as if we just needed a second chance to be decent people—but a slate on which is written all the good that Christ has done on our behalf.

This divine love, freely bestowed, is the only gift that can truly change the world. Laws won’t change hearts. Cultures of outrage won’t change hearts. Policy changes and political machinations won’t change hearts. And hashtag activism won’t change hearts, either. The only catalyst for inner change in the hearts of those who bear the image of God is incorporation into the image of God made flesh—Jesus Christ.

This particular man, this enfleshed God, is our only hope in this world for love, for peace, for wholeness, for living the lives we were created to have. To lose ourselves in him, so that he lives through us, loves through us, forgives and gives through us, is to see God at work, changing the world, in little and big ways, through his unrelenting hand of mercy.

]]>Our Fingerprints Are All Over the Crimes of the WorldFor God So Loved the AnimalsTheological ReflectionsChad BirdFri, 21 Sep 2018 12:28:47 +0000http://www.chadbird.com/blog/2018/9/21/for-god-so-loved-the-animals560ea60ae4b07240bdc61f4c:5613e2a5e4b0b4335e8193de:5ba4e23471c10bcbed5105e7We tend to forget that man’s very first action was not to build a house,
plant a garden, or even worship God. His first responsibility was to
interact with animals. God formed ravens and eagles, elephants and dogs,
every living creature, paraded them before Adam, and gave him the authority
to name them.We tend to forget that man’s very first action was not to build a house, plant a garden, or even worship God. His first responsibility was to interact with animals. God formed ravens and eagles, elephants and dogs, every living creature, paraded them before Adam, and gave him the authority to name them.

On the day of his creation, before he ate and drank, before he found a mate, before everything else, man cared for animals. They stood before him not in fear, but in communion and community. He was like their mother and father all rolled into one, giving them their names when they emerged from the womb of the earth into this bright and beautiful new world.

It wasn’t just a dog who was man’s best friend. Dung beetles and alligators, sparrows and giraffes, they all looked Adam in the eye and saw in him their father, their loving king.

I’ve heard thousands of sermons over my lifetime. Some of them dealt with the most esoteric of themes, subjects over which the Bible has little if anything to say explicitly. What is strange, and disappointing, is that not one of them addressed a theme that reverberates from Genesis to Revelation: @@As God loves and cares for animals, so we who are his image-bearers in this world, are called to love and care for them, too.@@

Faithful, God-Fearing Animals

Have you ever noticed that God’s concern for animals is smack dab in the middle of one of the most well-known portions of Scripture—the Ten Commandments? Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. But also remember that the Sabbath is not only for you, but for your animals. “The seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall do no work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you” (Exodus 20:11). Sabbath is not only for humans, but for animals as well.

In fact, I suspect the only creatures who were willingly obedient to the Sabbath command were the animals. For over and over in the biblical story, birds and beasts prove far more faithful to God than we do.

For instance, as the Flood approached, Noah didn’t have to trap and net and herd the animals into the ark. While almost the entire human population scoffed at God’s warning and refused his call to repent, the animals came quite willingly (Gen 7:8-9). So there weren’t just eight believers on the ark, for in the heart of all the animals too, there was an implicit trust in their Creator. As if to honor them, after the flood, God makes a covenant not only with humanity, but with the animals, too (9:16).

And that’s just one story. The Bible is full of them. Here are but three examples.

2. When Balaam was on his way to curse Israel, blind to anything but his own will, his donkey saw the angel of the Lord and saved his master’s life (Numbers 22). God even opened the donkey’s mouth to rebuke Balaam. On the donkey’s back sat a recalcitrant, cruel, man of lies, while the beast was true, faithful, merciful, and honest. This animal proved a far better preacher than Balaam.

3. In Elijah’s day, while those created in the image and likeness of God were worshiping idols, murdering people, and trampling underfoot the word of the Lord, the ravens remained faithful to the divine will as they brought Elijah food in the wilderness (1 Kings 17:4-6).

You get the point. @@I suspect that if animals could preach, they’d soon have all the human clergy on the unemployment line.@@

The Gospel Is for All Creation

This is not to say, of course, that animals remain unaffected by human sin and evil. All creation stands downwind from our rebellion against God. The whole world, Paul says, is in slavery, groans and suffers, because of us. We are the reason volcanoes erupt, hurricanes drown, snakes strike, ants sting, dogs bite. We, the fathers and mothers of creation, the kings and queens of this world, are the fountainhead of all corruption and evil that permeates creation. So don’t ever point your finger at Mother Nature and blame her; we, not she, are the guilty party.

For us, the guilty party, God himself was crucified. Yet I find it most interesting, that in the psalm that describes, in prophetic detail, what happens on that cross, animal metaphors are all over the place. “Many bulls have surrounded me,” the crucified Messiah prays (Ps 22:12). His enemies are like “a ravening and roaring lion,” (v. 13). He goes on to say, “Dogs have surrounded me,” (v. 16).

Bulls, lions, dogs. Why all these metaphors from the animal kingdom to describe humanity as it encircles the crucified Savior? I suspect I know why. Because the man on the cross, God incarnate, is there for all creation, not just humanity.

The death and resurrection of Christ is for us and for all creation. He dies for our sin, yes, but he also rises to usher in a new world, which we await in hope. The Gospel, the good news, is also good news to dogs and cows and lions and fish and birds. It’s good news to trees and mountains, rivers and oceans, dirt and rocks. When Christ returns to form a new heavens and a new earth, all creation will be set free from its slavery to corruption and brought into the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Rom 8:21). @@Good Friday and Easter are for the animal kingdom, too.@@

What is the upshot of all this? We who are God’s stewards, the earthly fathers and mothers of creation, have some work to do. We need to relearn what it means to care for animals, not exploit them. To recapture what it means to love and protect animals. To see in them not just a tool, a thing for us to use or abuse, but as those with whom we will share the new creation to come.

And, I might add, we remind ourselves to be a little more humble around animals. Because, chances are, in ways unbeknownst to us, in ways too mysterious and impenetrable for our observation, our pets watch us and lift their eyes toward heaven with a silent prayer that we, like them, will one day learn to live on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.